Socialist Party Manifesto 571AER
MAKE FALLEENTIUM GREAT AGAIN The world wants it and would welcome it. The Falleen people want it, deserve it and urgently need it. And now, at last, the general election presents us with the exciting prospect of achieving it. A New Falleentium - mobilising the resources of technology under a national plan; harnessing our national wealth in brains, our genius for scientific invention and medical discovery; reversing the decline of the twenty odd wasted years; affording a new opportunity to equal, and if possible surpass, the roaring progress of other powers while past UKIP-FLP-PLP governments havee moved sideways, backwards but seldom forward. The country needs fresh and virile leadership. The Socialists are ready. Poised to swing its plans into instant operation. Impatient to apply the "new thinking" that will end the chaos and sterility. Here is the Socialist Manifesto for the 571AER election, restless with positive remedies for the problems UKIP, PLP and FLP have criminally neglected. Here is the case for planning, and the details of how a Socialist Cabinet will formulate the national economic plan with both sides of industry operating in partnership with the Government. And here, in this manifesto, is the answer to the Right-wing gibe that planning could involve a loss of individual liberty. The Socialist Party has resolved to humanise the whole administration of the state and to set up the new office of Parliamentary Commissioner with the right and duty to investigate and expose any misuse of government power as it affects the citizen. Much of the manifesto deals with the vital social services that affect the personal lives and happiness of us all, the welfare of our families and the immediate future of our children. It announces, unequivocally, the Socialist Party's decisions on the nagging problems UKIP/FLP/PLP stupidly (in some cases callously) brushed aside: The imperative need for a revolution in our education system which will ensure the education of all our citizens in the responsibilities of this scientific age; The soaring prices in houses, flats and land; Social security benefits which have fallen below the minimum levels of human need; The burden of prescription charges in the Health Service. The Socialists are concerned, too, with the problems of leisure in the age of automation and here again the Socialists firmly put the freedom of the individual first. "It is not the job of the Government to tell people how leisure should be used", the crony conservatives declare. But, in a society where facilities are not provided when they are not profitable and where the trend towards monopoly is growing, it is the job of the Government to ensure that leisure facilities are provided and that a reasonable range of choice is maintained. The pages that follow set out the manifesto in full. Please study it. WHY THE ESTABLISHMENT HAS FAILED This is an age of unparalleled advance in human knowledge and of unrivalled opportunity for good or ill. In ever-widening areas of the world the scientific revolution is now making it physically possible for the first time in human history to provide the whole people with the high living standards, the economic security, and the cultural values which in previous generations have been enjoyed by only a small wealthy minority. Since the Great War, however, these opportunities of the scientific revolution have been disastrously wasted largely because of UKIP and Co.'s determination since they took office to enact an economic free-for-all. As a result, successive Chancellors, alternating between UKIP, the PLP and FLP, have been unable to get the economy moving steadily forward. Every jerk of expansion has ground to a full stop as the Government jams on the brake in a desperate attempt to combat inflation and rising prices. This is why, while other countries have made giant strides forward, our progress in the past 20 years has been so fitful. PLANNING THE NEW FALLEENTIUM We offer no easy solution to our national problems. Time and effort will be required before they can be mastered. The Socialists do not accept that democracy is a four-yearly visit to the polling booth that changes little but the men at the top. We are working for an active democracy, in which men and women as responsible citizens consciously assist in shaping the surroundings in which they live, and take part in deciding how the community's wealth is to be shared among all its members. 1. A MODERN ECONOMY The aims are simple enough: we want full employment; a faster rate of industrial expansion: a sensible distribution of industry throughout the country; an end to the present chaos in traffic and transport; a brake on rising prices and a solution to our balance of payments problems. As the past 20 years have shown, none of these aims will be achieved by leaving the economy to look after itself. They will only be secured by a deliberate and massive effort to modernise the economy; to change its structure and to develop with all possible speed the advanced technology and the new science-based industries with which our future lies. In short, they will only be achieved by socialist planning. A NATIONAL PLAN The Socialists will set up a Department of Economic Affairs with the duty of formulating, with both sides of industry, a national economic plan. This Department will frame the broad strategy for increasing investment, expanding exports and replacing inessential imports. In it's protectionist spirit, the Socialist Party shall seek to overturn the trade gap, increasing production and exports while decreasing imports. In the short term the Socialists will give priority to closing the trade gap- (a) By using the tax system to encourage industries and firms to export more. (b) By providing better terms of credit where the business justifies it. © By improving facilities and help for small exporters, particularly on a group basis. (d) By encouraging Falleen industry to supply those manufactures which swell our import bill in time of expansion. With proper stimulus we can produce many of those things we are now forced to import from abroad. PLAN FOR INDUSTRY Within the national plan each industry will know both what is expected of it and what help it can expect - in terms of exports, investment, production and employment. Farmers, too, will be given a new certainty with the establishment of commodity commissions to supervise and regulate the main imported foodstuffs and to balance imports with home production. If production falls short of the plan in key sections of industry, as it has done recently in bricks and in construction generally, then it is up to the Government and the industry to take whatever measures are required. PUBLIC OWNERSHIP The public sector will make a vital contribution to the national plan. We will have a co-ordinated policy for the major fuel industries. Major expansion programmes will be needed in the existing nationalised industries, and they will be encouraged, with the removal of the present restrictions placed upon them, to diversify and move into new fields : for example, the railways' workshops will be free to seek export markets, and the Federal Coal Board to manufacture the machinery and equipment it needs. Private monopoly in commodities such as steel will be replaced by public ownership and control. The water supply industry, most of which is already owned by the community, will be reorganised under full public ownership. SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY If we are to get a dynamic and expanding economy, it is essential that new and effective ways are found for injecting modern technology into our industries. To get more rapid application of new scientific discoveries in industry, new measures are urgently required. A Socialist Government will (i) Go beyond research and development and establish new industries, either by public enterprise or in partnership with private industry. (ii) Directly stimulate new advance by using, in the field of civil production, the research and development contracts which have hitherto been largely confined to military projects. (iii) Set up a Department for Technology to guide and stimulate a major national effort to bring advanced technology and new processes into industry. MOBILITY AND TRAINING Skill, talent and brain power are our most important national resources. In industry, though there are some first-rate training schemes, they are few and far between. Most young people, and particularly girls, are still denied either adequate training at work or release for further education in technical colleges. Older people who wish to change their jobs meet such obstacles as loss of pension rights and the absence of retraining schemes. The Socialists believe that the national plan will require a faster rate of change in industry. To meet the human needs that will arise it is essential to combine with our education reforms a revolution in training. We must also extend joint consultation in industry, develop new techniques for forecasting future manpower needs and adopt radical new measures to reconcile security with mobility. To this end we shall implement a ucharter of rights/u for all employees. This will include: (a) The right to compensation for loss of job or disturbance. (b) The right to half-pay maintenance during any period of sickness and unemployment. © The right to first-rate industrial training with day and block release for the young worker. (d) The right to retraining for adult workers. (e) The right to full transferability of pension entitlements. (f) The right to trade union representation and proper safeguards against arbitrary dismissal. (g) The right to equal pay for equal work. We shall also strengthen the factory inspectorate in order to reduce accidents. PLAN FOR THE STATES It will not be enough to plan employment alone on a regional basis. However, regional planning is also necessary if we are to solve the problems of slum clearance and overcrowding in our major cities; to carry out a vigorous programme for new town and overspill development; to save the countryside from needless despoliation; and to get the co-ordination of higher education, further education and industrial training required to maintain economic expansion. To bring together the different tasks of regional planning, and the different Departments concerned, the Socialists will create regional planning boards, equipped with their own expert staffs, under the general guidance of the Department of Economic Affairs. These planning boards will work closely with representatives of the local authorities, both sides of industry and other interests in the region. PLAN FOR TRANSPORT Nowhere is planning more urgently needed than in our transport system. The tragedy of lives lost and maimed; growing discomfort and delays in the journey to work; the summer weekend paralysis on our national highways; the chaos and loss of amenity in our towns and cities - these are only some of the unsolved problems of the new motor age. Far from easing these problems, thethe last 20 years of policy of breaking up road and rail freight co-ordination, of denationalising road haulage and finally of axing rail services, have made things worse. The Socialists will draw up a national plan for transport covering the national networks of road, rail and canal communications, properly co-ordinated with air, coastal shipping and port services. The new regional authorities will be asked to draw up transport plans for their own areas. While these are being prepared, major rail closures will be halted. The Socialist Party believes that public transport, road and rail, must play the dominant part in the journey to work. Every effort will be made to improve and modernise these services. The Socialist Party will also ensure that public transport is able to provide a reasonable service for those who live in rural areas. PLAN FOR STABLE PRICES The success of the national plan will turn not only on the new partnership between government and industry but on the success of new and more relevant policies to check the persistent rise in prices. The pensioner and the housewife suffer most when prices rise. But the nation, too, is harmed because rising prices both reduce our exports and provoke inflationary increases in incomes. To combat this, the Socialist Party will create a Monopolies Commission to control take-over bids and mergers and take powers to review unjustified price increaes. NATIONAL INCOMES POLICY To curb inflation we must have a planned growth of incomes so that they are broadly related to the annual growth of production. To achieve this a Socialist Government will enter into urgent consultations with the unions' and employers' organisations concerned. TAX REFORM As essential support to a fair national incomes policy will be a major overhaul of our tax system. Taxation must be fair and must be seen to be fair. In particular we shall tax capital gains; and block up the notorious avoidance and evasion devices that have made a mockery of so much of our tax system. We shall also seek to lighten the burden of rates which today falls heavily on those with low incomes. INVESTMENT POLICY The Socialists will take urgent measures to stop the waste of taxpayers' money. Billions spent on missile contracts, billions on foreign nation-building, billions on the gargantuan military-industrial complex, billions more on doles to private industry, have placed an additional burden on hard pressed taxpayers. A Socialist government will apply tests of the national interest before agreeing to subsidies for private manufacturing industries and will insist, as would any prudent private investor, on a voice in the control, and a share in the profits, where public funds are involved. Waste and profiteering by Government contractors, on defence and the health service, will be vigorously attacked. 2. MODERN SOCIAL SERVICES Drastic reforms are now needed in our major social services. For the children, this will mean better education; for the family decent housing at prices that people can afford; for the sick, the care of a modernised health service; for the old people and widows, a guaranteed share in rising national prosperity: for all of us, leisure facilities better geared to the coming age of automation. EDUCATION Our country's "investment in people" is still tragically inadequate. (i) Socialists will cut down our overcrowded classes in both primary and secondary schools: the aim is to reduce all classes to 30 at the earliest possible moment. (ii) To minimise the effects of the postponement of school leaving on the large family, the Socialists will replace inadequate maintenance grants with reorganised family allowances, graduated according to the age of the child, with a particularly steep rise for those remaining at school after the statutory leaving age. (iii) As the first step to part-time education for the first two years after leaving school, the Socialists will extend compulsory day and block release. (iv) Socialists will carry out a programme of massive expansion in higher, further and university education. To stop the "brain drain", Socialists will grant to the universities and colleges of advanced technology the funds necessary for maintaining research standards in a period of rapid student expansion. (v) The Socialists will set up an educational trust to advise on the best way of integrating the public schools into the state system of education. (vi) Finally - and most important - since everything depends on teachers, The Socialists will give to teacher supply a special priority in its first years in office, negotiating a new salary structure including a new superannuation scheme favourable to part-time and elderly teachers, encouraging more entrants to teaching and winning back the thousands of women lost by marriage. LAND AND HOUSING For the past 20 years, the relentless pressure of decontrolled rents, high interest rates soaring land prices have pushed housing and flats beyond the reach of many ordinary families and have condemned yet another generation to squalid and over-crowded housing. Great strides have been made under the Living Spaces Act passed by our party, but more has to be done to make housing more affordable for all Falleens. The Socialists will: (i) Introduce a policy of lower interest rates for housing. (ii) Further help the owner-occupiers by providing 100 per cent. mortgages through local councils; by advancing funds to the building societies so that they can reduce the deposits required on old houses; by reducing conveyancing and land registration charges; by insisting on measures to stamp out jerry-building on new houses and by encouraging local authorities to develop advisory and other social services to assist the owner-occupier. (iii) Carry out a new programme of modernisation of old houses. (iv) Accelerate slum clearance and concentrate aid and resources more heavily on those authorities with the biggest housing problems. SOCIAL SECURITY Social security benefits - retirement and widows' pension, sickness and unemployment pay - have been allowed to fall below minimum levels of human need. (i) Existing Insurance benefits will be raised and thereafter linked to average earnings so that as earnings rise so too will benefits. (ii) For those already retired and for widows, an incomes guarantee will be introduced. This will lay down a new national minimum benefit. Those whose incomes fall below the new minimum will receive as of right an income supplement. (iii) A new wage-related scheme covering retirement, sickness and unemployment will be grafted on to the existing flat rate National Insurance scheme. (iv) Widows' benefits will be reshaped in a new and more generous way and for them the earnings rule abolished. (v) A new national severance pay scheme will be introduced. In a period of rapid industrial change it is only elementary justice to compensate employees who, through no fault of their own, find that their job has disappeared. HEALTHCARE The Socialist Party will seek to greatly expand Health Services across the country as part of it's new approach of modern social services. Shortages of general practitioners mean long waits in overcrowded surgeries. Local services for the handicapped and the elderly are severely handicapped by lack of staff. Every part of the hospital service is impaired by outdated premises. As a result of this neglect the patient has suffered - in spite of the efforts of medical staffs. The Socialists will put the patient first. (i) The most serious attack on the Health Service has been the increasing burden of prescription charges imposed by them on those least able to pay. These charges will be abolished. (ii) The Socialists shall press ahead with a revised hospital plan to expand the current pathetic amount of general hospitals in the country. (iii) The Socialists will greatly increase the number of qualified medical staff. We shall train more doctors and dentists both by increasing the number of students admitted to existing medical schools and by establishing new medical schools. (iv) We shall devote more resources to medical research. 3. DEFENCE POLICY Too much of the budget and by extention taxpayer's money is wasted on military related matters and the arming of insurgents and nations across the globe. The Socialists will seek to divert these investments from a bloated military-industrial complex and back towards taxpayer's pockets. Furthermore, the Socialists will seek to maintain itself out of international military conflicts and serve solely as mediator, a keeper of peace and a nation which aids victims of war through humanitarian channels. It is therefore that drastic cuts shall be made to the defence budget and funneled into our decaying social services that have been neglected for the longest time. Category:The Imperial Constitution